


Wires

by Trash



Category: Bastille (Band)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Gen, Mental Illness, Self Harm, Suicide, just a whole load of nothing nice or good or wholesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-16
Updated: 2019-04-16
Packaged: 2020-01-14 21:08:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18484390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trash/pseuds/Trash
Summary: Dan has wires under his skin.





	Wires

Someone once told Dan there is blood just under the surface of everything, but he knows that isn’t true. What look like veins, the spidery fingers of burst capillaries, they’re all just wires. 

He told someone once and they gave him medication. Later, when the pills had time to do their thing, they asked, “do you still have wires under your skin?”

“No,” Dan said, and smiled an easy smile, like he was embarrassed and couldn’t believe he’d ever said something so crazy. 

But they were still there, the wires. That’s how the messages got through. They’d tell him to do things, but not the way crazy people’s voices do. Normal things. Time to get out of bed, the message would say. So he’d get out of bed. 

Time to take a shower. 

Drink water. 

Normal stuff. 

He wonders how people get through their day without the messages coming down the wires. He’s grateful for them, because who knows what kind of mess he would be without them. 

He gets sick and the doctor tells him it’s a virus. No way of treating it, she says, just wait it out. Stay warm. 

Virus. The word feels the way sand does in your hands - nothing you can hold onto. And he can feel it in the wires, feel the virus surging through his body. And the messages are jumbled. Static. Like a magnet on a hard drive. 

Rip them out, Dan thinks. Breaks open the head of his razor with ease, drags one of the blades from his wrist to his forearm. There’s blood, and there shouldn’t be. The virus, he reckons, it’s all the virus. 

Gets in the bath so he doesn’t make a mess. The blood is more slippy than he imagined it would be. Not that he spent a lot of time thinking about it. So he doesn’t know where that thought came from. The virus. Focus focus focus. Gets in the bath. 

His left hand doesn’t grip the blade as well as the right, and he has to press harder. But eventually he’s there. The blood escaping. And he feels clean as it leaves, and the messages are less jumbled now. They’re calmer. Calm. 

Calmer than before.


End file.
